Guide: How to organise desk sharing in four steps

Organising desk sharing: key takeaways

• Measure real utilisation: Track actual office attendance and workstation use for two to four weeks, for example with automated data from PULT Presence.
• Determine the desk sharing ratio: Use the measurement data to calculate how many workstations you truly need, including peak days and special cases.
• Structure the office: Set up standardised workstations and divide the space into areas for focused work, team work, meetings and phone calls.
• Define rules: Establish guidelines for booking, clean desk expectations, behaviour in each zone and data protection.
• Organise booking: Use a central booking system to reserve desks, rooms and zones reliably and to detect no shows automatically.

Step 1: needs analysis and planning

To make desk sharing work well in your organisation, you need a simple but reliable set of data. The goal is to determine how many people are actually in the office at the same time and how intensively your workstations are used. Only with these numbers can you decide how many desks you will need in the future.

Measuring actual office attendance

With PULT Presence you can capture office attendance and see how many employees are on site at the same time. Your team does not need to do anything, because detection happens passively. There is no extra effort involved:

• Automatic check in through the company Wi Fi
• No manual action required from employees
• Compliant with data protection rules, because only aggregated attendance values are used
• Detection of actual attendance rather than bookings, so no shows are excluded

This gives you precise office attendance data over a period of two to four weeks without needing to introduce a booking system beforehand.

Measuring the actual use of your workstations

Alongside attendance tracking, you should record how many desks and areas are actually being used. With PULT Office Insights you receive:

• Utilisation reports for desks, rooms and zones
• Visualisations of how each area is used on the floor plan
• No show rates
• Office utilisation by day and time

This lets you see immediately which areas are overused and which are underused.

Calculating the desk sharing ratio

The desk sharing ratio shows the relationship between the number of available workstations and the total number of employees.

Example: you have one hundred employees and seventy workstations. Your desk sharing ratio is zero point seven.

When you use this metric, take into account employees who still require a permanently assigned workstation. This may be necessary due to physical needs or because they rely on specialised hardware, for example a high performance video editing setup.

Define your target setup

Based on your attendance data, usage data and the desk sharing ratio, you decide:

• How many workstations you will need in the future
• Which areas need to be adjusted and whether, for example, more space for team meetings is required
• Whether any parts of the office should be redesigned or repurposed

2. Set up the office for desk sharing

For desk sharing to work well for everyone, the office needs the right structure and an environment that supports the new concept. This includes standardised workstation equipment, new storage options and redesigned areas and zones.

Standardised and ergonomic workstations

The daily switch between different workstations is most comfortable for your employees when every desk has the same equipment. Make sure you provide:

• height adjustable desks
• identical monitor setups
• universal docking stations or monitor adapters
• ergonomic chairs that can be adjusted quickly
• reliable Wi Fi throughout the entire office

Sufficient storage space

In a desk sharing setup, everyone needs a place for personal work items and clothing, for a backpack or bag, for bike helmets or a favourite mug. The following solutions have proven effective:

• lockers
• sufficiently large storage cupboards
• mobile pedestals for work items such as a keyboard, mouse or headset

Here is the natural English translation:

Divide the office into zones

Zoning helps prevent disruptions and makes the space more usable. Typical areas include:

• quiet zones with single workstations for focused work
• areas for phone calls and video calls
• zones for team work and collaboration
• break areas
• rooms or zones for exercise, balance and recovery

3. Introduce desk sharing rules

Few but well considered desk sharing rules create fairness and maintain hygiene at all workstations.

• Booking rules: define how far in advance workstations can be reserved. In PULT you can specify for each employee, team and department which resources they are allowed to book.
• Clean desk policy: it requires that sensitive data, storage devices and documents are not left on desks. Computers must be locked even during short absences.
• Behaviour in different zones: set expectations for how people should behave in each area, for example consideration and silence in quiet zones.
• Cleanliness: workstations should be left clean and tidy, and no personal items may remain. Provide stations with wipes and cleaning supplies to support this.

4. Introduce the booking process and booking software

A desk booking system makes daily work easier for your team. In PULT, individual workstations, meeting rooms, zones and parking spaces can be reserved reliably in advance.

These resources can be booked in PULT

With PULT your team can reserve the available spaces in your office in advance.

• workstations and desks
• zones you have defined, such as quiet areas, team zones and recreation areas
• meeting rooms
• parking spaces
• visitor workstations
• catering or additional services for meetings

How desk booking works in PULT

Your employees can make reservations in PULT in several ways:

• on a smartphone, tablet, laptop, desktop or terminal
• through interactive floor plans that show available spaces in real time
• through integrations in Slack, Microsoft Teams, Outlook or Google Calendar
• with filters that allow them to select a workstation based on available equipment or the type of zone

‍

If a team member does not show up for their reservation, PULT can release the booking automatically and make the resource available again. You can define how long the reservation should remain active after the scheduled start time.

Automatic attendance detection

Check in happens automatically through the company Wi Fi with a zero click process. As soon as one of the employee’s devices connects to the network, PULT recognises their presence.

• no manual confirmation or check in required
• reliable detection of actual attendance
• accurate identification of no shows

{{onpage-cta}}

Tipp: Here you will find desk sharing insights and practical tips on how desk sharing works in public sector organisations.